Does training in post-editing affect creativity?

Abstract

This article presents the results of an experiment with eleven students from two universities that translated and post-edited three literary texts distributed on the first and last days of their translation technology modules. The source texts were marked with units of creative potential to assess creativity in the target texts (before and after training). The texts were subsequently reviewed by an independent professional literary translator and translation trainer. The results show that there is no quantitative evidence to conclude that the training significantly affects students’ creativity. However, after the training, a change is observed both in the quantitative data and in the reflective essays, i.e. the students are more willing to try creative shifts and they feel more confident to tackle machine translation (MT) issues, while also showing a higher number of errors. Further, we observe that students have a higher degree of creativity in human translation (HT), but significantly fewer errors in post-editing (PE) overall, especially at the start of the training, than in HT.